RANDOM FOREST AND OBJECTED-BASED CLASSIFICATION FOR FOREST PEST EXTRACTION FROM UAV AERIAL IMAGERY

Abstract. Forest pest is one of the most important factors affecting the health of forest. However, since it is difficult to figure out the pest areas and to predict the spreading ways just to partially control and exterminate it has not effective enough so far now. The infected areas by it have continuously spreaded out at present. Thus the introduction of spatial information technology is highly demanded. It is very effective to examine the spatial distribution characteristics that can establish timely proper strategies for control against pests by periodically figuring out the infected situations as soon as possible and by predicting the spreading ways of the infection. Now, with the UAV photography being more and more popular, it has become much cheaper and faster to get UAV images which are very suitable to be used to monitor the health of forest and detect the pest. This paper proposals a new method to effective detect forest pest in UAV aerial imagery. For an image, we segment it to many superpixels at first and then we calculate a 12-dimension statistical texture information for each superpixel which are used to train and classify the data. At last, we refine the classification results by some simple rules. The experiments show that the method is effective for the extraction of forest pest areas in UAV images.